Abstract
How human understand and represent concepts is always a hot topic in cognitive psychology. According to the conceptual metaphor theory 1, 2, understanding and representing abstract concepts rely on concrete concepts via metaphoric mappings. In this review, we discussed three core issues with the aim to have a comprehensive understanding of conceptual metaphors. First, I describe the underlying process of metaphoric mappings. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) 2 put forward that the source domain (concrete concepts) can be used to represent the target domain (abstract concepts). The metaphoric mappings from source domains to target domains are characterized as image schemas, which structure and provide sensory-motor grounding for abstract concepts. Then, I concerned on the directionality (the second issue) and automaticity (the third issue) of metaphoric mappings. According to conceptual metaphor theory, metaphoric mappings have the directionality from the concrete domain to the abstract domain, which is an automatic and obligatory process with neither effort nor awareness. However, directionality and automaticity were debated by recent research. In this article, by focusing on the three important issues I provided a comprehensive review which would help deepen our understanding about the nature of metaphoric mappings.
Highlights
An ancient but significant topic in human cognition is how human understand concepts and represent information mentally
What are the mental representations in human mind, and how are mental representations formed? Are mental representations perceptual or non-perceptual? The topic has been discussed through a long history, from viewing cognition as to be perceptual by philosophers before two thousand years ago, to that perceptual character in cognition was eliminated for being considered to be unscientific by behaviorists and philosophers [3,4,5] with the development of logic, statistic, and computer science in the early twentieth century, and to the emergence of theories of embodied cognition which turns back, but progressively to perceptual symbol systems about the representation scheme
The metaphoric mappings from source domains to target domains are characterized as image schemas
Summary
An ancient but significant topic in human cognition is how human understand concepts and represent information mentally. Conceptual metaphor theory maintained the understanding of abstract concepts depends on the perceptual information of concrete concepts through conceptual metaphors Both share the basic view that perceptual information is necessary to conceptual understanding and cognitive processing is embodied and grounded in physical experience consisting of (re)activation of multimodal representations through direct physical interactions with physical referents in the world. Schema-consistency effect appeared in space-to-time condition, indicating people can use spatial schema (concrete domain) to represent time (abstract domain); participants were not influenced by temporal primes when interpreting ambiguous spatial target questions, which is consistent with the weak metaphoric structuring view (spatial schemas can be used to, but not necessary to think about time). These inconsistent findings prevent us have a clear conclusion about the automaticity of the activation of conceptual metaphor, which could be further investigated in future studies
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